The JFK Database is essential for anyone working with the JFK Assassination Records Collection (JFKARC). Unfortunately, the last official update to the JFK Database was in 2021. In the meantime, as of this writing (July 2026), over 14,000 records have been re-released, meaning key Database information is out of date.
Fortunately, we have detailed information on changes since 2021, and now that record releases are basically completed, it is possible for researchers to update the JFK database themselves. Such unofficial updates are of course guaranteed to have some errors.
Nonetheless, I believe that even a tentative, unofficial update is worth the effort. After filling in this updated information, it is possible to get a much more complete and accurate view of record releases from 2017 to 2026. This has been a major goal of this website since it first began.
Why? First, a review allows us to get a much more accurate overview of when and how records were released. Second, it allows us to follow agency releases and decisions at a much more detailed level.
Most discussions of the ARC release process have been careless and undocumented, often focusing on just a handful of records and giving a slanted, exaggerated or inaccurate picture. This series will offer detailed corrections to these confused claims.
Note, however, that Rex Bradford’s work at the MFF website is an important exception to the inaccurate and careless discussions of ARC releases that abound on the internet. Bradford’s review of the ARC in 2023 is especially important. I will refer to this article several times below.
Overview of this article
1. Intro to the JFK Database and the 2021 update
2. Meaning of “release” and release types: Open, Redacted, Withheld
3. NARA releases: total count
4. Record counts by Department/Agency
5. NARA releases vs the 2021 JFK database
6. Records in the ARC not yet released in full
7. My two cents
Introduction to the JFK Database
The JFK Assassination Records Collection (JFKARC) was created by the JFK Act. The Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in 1992. It required government departments and agencies (D/A) to search out records they held relating to the assassination of President Kennedy and send these to NARA, which was responsible for assembling them into the JFKARC.
The JFK Act also required D/As to create “identification aids” for the records forwarded to NARA. These aids were designed by NARA and include basic metadata for the records, including file numbers, file dates, number of pages, record originators, recipients, subjects, classification status, release status, etc.
NARA called these aids “Record Information Forms” (RIFs). Each RIF is identified by a unique number, such as ‘104-10001-10000’, providing an index for all records with RIFs.1Note that in addition to “Reader Information Form”, RIF is also sometimes used as an abbreviation for “Released In Full”.
Not every record in the JFKARC had to have an identification aid. This is a confusing topic. See my page on ARC contents for more details on all this.
Records and releasing
What does it mean when a NARA press release writes “x records were released on date y”?
“Record” here refers to JFKARC records posted on NARA’s JFK website. Most “records” that NARA posted were pdfs: digital files presenting visual information, such as text, photographs, and drawings. A small number of records are audio recordings. These were posted online as .wav or .mp3 files.
What does “release” mean? This is not as simple as it might seen. Take the case of a text record. The record consists of text. When all the text on the source document becomes available to the public, it is “open”, or “released in full” (RIF).
When none of the text from the source document is available to the public, the record is “withheld.” In 2017, a number of the records posted at NARA had previously been completely unavailable to the public. They were “withheld”.
In between these two record states, there is a third: “released in part” (RIP), or “redacted.” “Redacting” a document means removing information (usually text) from a document and replacing it with a “holder” that indicates something has been removed. The ARC uses a blank box as a holder. One blank box = one redaction. Redacted documents thus hold back information from the public.2For those concerned about losing documents, rest assured that ARC redaction was done on copies. The original source documents were all kept in secure storage.
Records released in full were not posted on NARA’s JFK website.3They are now being posted through NARA’s online catalogue. They were posted online only if they had been “redacted” or “withheld.”
I estimate that roughly 3000-plus records posted in 2017 were previously withheld, out of a total of about 36500 pdfs posted at NARA that year.
Other records posted at NARA in 2017 had previously been available to the public, either online or onsite at NARA’s College Park facility, but not in full These records were thus “redacted.”
It is important to underline that many of the pdfs posted at NARA in 2017 were “released in full.” The redacted information was all restored, and the entire document became available for public inspection.
When records were posted at NARA, many were NOT released in full, but they usually had at least one redaction restored when posted.4There were sometimes cases where redacted records were posted at NARA twice, with no discernable difference between the two copies. I have several posts on this confusing topic. To read more, search the website for the phrase “duplicate records.”
Most pdfs posted at NARA AFTER 2017 were simply re-releases of pdfs posted in 2017, with one or more redactions restored. These “peeling the onion” releases mean that one record could be posted at NARA as many as five or six times before all the redacted information was restored.
Note that the JFK Act did not provide for the release of all information in all records. Some records with tax information and a few records sealed by a court are still withheld, i.e. not available for public inspection. Their basic metadata is included in the JFK Database, however.
In cases where tax information is mixed together with other material, the JFK Act did provide for the release of the non-tax information. Since the tax information is still held back, one could say that these records are “redacted.”
In such cases, however, I believe that “releasable” information is now all available for public inspection. Call this another form of “released in full.” I will have a separate note on these records.
Summing up, there are three types of releasing in the ARC:
1) withheld = not released, except for descriptive information (metadata)
2) redacted = released in part (RIP)
3) open = released in full (RIF)
ARC release sets, 2017-2026
I estimate that about 74,700 records (pdfs or audio files) were posted at NARA from 2017 to 2026. These records were posted on NARA’s JFK website in 17 tranches:
| # | release date | record count | |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 2017-07-24 | 3810* | |
| #2 | 2017-10-26 | 2891 | |
| #3 | 2017-11-03 | 676 | |
| #4 | 2017-11-09 | 13213 | |
| #5 | 2017-11-17 | 10744 | |
| #6 | 2017-12-15 | 4230* | |
| #7 | 2018-04-26 | 18900* | |
| #8 | 2021-12-15 | 1491 | |
| #9 | 2022-12-15 | 13251 | |
| #10 | 2023-04-13 | 422 | |
| #11 | 2023-04-27 | 355 | |
| #12 | 2023-05-11 | 502 | |
| #13 | 2023-06-13 | 290 | |
| #14 | 2023-06-27 | 1103 | |
| #15 | 2023-08-24 | 21 | |
| #16 | 2025-03-18 | 2566 | |
| #17 | 2026-01-30 | 139 | |
| total | ~74700 |
These release counts can be compared with Rex Bradford’s 2023 article (available here). Asterisks mark counts that differ from Bradford 2023, and I have added file counts for the 2025-2026 releases as well.
There are numerous problems with counting files released by NARA, but as a comparison between Bradford and this article will show, our counts do not vary by much.
Do these counts mean that pdfs and audio files for 74,700 distinct, unique records in the ARC were posted at NARA? Absolutely not! The total number of unique records posted at NARA was about 37,230, a little less than half of the total number of files posted.
This is the result of “onion peeling” releases. The number of files posted at NARA is high because records were released incrementally. Not all “withheld” or “redacted” records were immediately released in full when posted on the NARA website.
Some records were posted as many as five or six times, each post releasing more information, until all redactions were gone and the record was released in full. It was this incremental release of redacted information that inflated the total count of files posted at NARA.
So how many unique records were posted at NARA? Following is a count by department or agency (D/A):
| # | Dept/Agency | prefix | Unique Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Federal Bureau of Investigation | 124 | 18058 |
| #2 | Central Intelligence Agency | 104 | 15953 |
| #3 | House Select Committee on Assassinations | 180 | 1227 |
| #4 | Church Committee | 157 | 495 |
| #5 | US Army Staff, ACSI G2 | 194 | 322 |
| #6 | John F. Kennedy Library | 176 | 309 |
| #7 | National Security Agency | 144 | 255 |
| #8 | Gerald R. Ford Library | 178 | 136 |
| #9 | National Archives (NARA) | 179 | 81 |
| #10 | Joint Chiefs of Staff | 202 | 77 |
| #11 | Office of the Secretary of the Army | 198 | 69 |
| #12 | Lyndon B. Johnson Library | 177 | 51 |
| #13 | National Security Council | 145 | 47 |
| #14 | National Archives and Record Administration | 181 | 39 |
| #15 | Department of State | 119 | 33 |
| #16 | Defense Intelligence Agency | 111 | 19 |
| #17 | President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board | 206 | 19 |
| #18 | House Select Committee on Intelligence | 135 | 14 |
| #19 | Office of the Secretary of Defense | 195 | 7 |
| #20 | US Secret Service | 154 | 6 |
| #21 | Army Corps of Engineers Pentagon Telecommunications Center |
197 | 5 |
| #22 | US Information Agency | 165 | 4 |
| #23 | Eisenhower Presidential Library | 203 | 2 |
| #24 | Internal Revenue Service | 137 | 1 |
| #25 | Office of Naval Intelligence | 173 | 1 |
| Total | 37,230 |
This table can also be compared with Bradford’s 2023 article. There are, of course, more records in this count, since it includes the 2025-2026 releases.
As Bradford 2023 noted, such detailed counts are subject to many complicating factors. Some of the pdfs posted at NARA were actually record fragments, i.e., not complete records. Some of the pdfs were multi-record, i.e. they included more than one record. There were other, even messier complications, as well. This count should therefore be taken as approximate, rather than 100 percent complete and accurate.
NARA releases and the 2021 JFK Database
One release complication is particularly worth noting here. The JFK Database, as I have noted several times, is not complete.
The current version of the Database has 319106 entries.5See my note here. However, for various technical reasons, perhaps as many as 8000-10000 records were not registered in the database.
Identification aids were compiled for virtually every record in the JFK Collection, and I am certain NARA has a complete list of records processed under the JFK Act. However, not all these records are listed in the public access Database, and not all of the information on the printed identification aids was transferred to the electronic database.
As a result, among the records posted at NARA from 2017 to 2026, there 1438 records that are not listed in the JFK database. When checking posted records against the Database, one must take this into account. There were 37,230 records posted at NARA: 1438 of these are not in the Database, so only 35792 do appear in the 2021 database.
I will not try to add such “missing” identification aids back into the 2021 update of the Database. Instead, I will treat these records in a separate note.
Records not released in full
Are all records in the JFKARC released in full?
No. I have noted in several posts that the microfilm version of the CIA’s 201 file for Lee Oswald has still not been released. There are about 30,000 pages in these records. NARA has assured us that all of these records are duplicates of the hard copy 201 file, which has been released in full.
Duplicate or not, however, under the JFK Act, the microfilm 201 must be released. I look forward to this important step in the near future.
There are other miscellaneous records that are also not yet released in full. Some of these we already know of, others we discover as NARA continues to post the entire JFK Collection online. I will list all such cases I have found in the final note in this series.
My two cents
This note gives general totals for pdfs posted at NARA and for records that have appeared in these pdfs. These totals supplement the counts in Rex Bradford’s 2023 article. Future notes will give a much more detailed description of what was released when.
This may seem like unnecessary detail, but much has been made of the how long it has taken to declassify these records, and the consequences of this delay in public confidence in the government.
A close look is therefore warranted, both for the JFK records, and for other current work and future declassification coming down the road.